Learning and Test Prep: A Deathly Difference

Empire State College’s Ian Reifowitz has a post on Daily Kos called “Test prep kills learning. But standardized testing is big money. Guess how this one turns out.” He writes: Here’s what it comes down to: If preparing for and taking the tests means taking kids away from real learning for a significant chunk of the…

Our College Students Now Owe Our Government and Banks about the Same Amount That Our Government Owes China

At the end of the 2013-2014 academic year, total outstanding student debt in the United States is estimated to be $1.08 trillion. About.com, which is quoting information provided in U.S. Treasury reports [http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/moneymatters/ss/How-Much-US-Debt-Does-China-Own.htm], provides the following overview of who holds U.S. government debt: “About 32 cents for every dollar of U.S. debt, or $4.6 trillion,…

Alternatives to the Growing Corporate Model of Education and Educational Assessment

One of the things the assessment gurus of corporate-style education don’t like is the idea of professors in complete control of the curriculum and pedagogy in their own classrooms. They want everyone “to be on the same page,” feeling that education has no value unless done in unison. This is the thinking behind most cries…

Beyond Occupy

The Occupy Movement has been the first major grassroots progressive movement in the United States in decades. But, at its core, the appeal of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been that it is politically unaffiliated, and that lack of structure, or, more precisely, that lack of structural purpose, has also been its undoing. Occupy…

Ten Reflections on What We Do with Our Time

I have been thinking a great deal about John Ziker and his coleagues’ detailed study of the work that we, as faculty members, do, and I think that their study supports, directly or at least conceptually, most of the following observations: 1. We work very hard—much harder than most people realize and, in most cases,…

President Obama’s Remarks at the White House Correspondents Dinner

Tonight, President Obama will be attending the White House Correspondents Dinner for the sixth time during his presidency. Below are links to the transcripts of his remarks at the first five dinners. I think that they are of interest for several reasons. First, he does this sort of thing better than any president—if not in history,…